Tag: History

I occasionally [1][2][3] dig into the available Founding-era record to see what we might be able to glean from the Founders’ words with relevance to modern debates on patent law and policy.  With t...

An article from Prof. Chris Beauchamp, newly published in the Vanderbilt Law Review and titled “Repealing Patents”, examines the history of Founding-era patent revocation.  It’s a complex story...

James Madison is credited with introducing the Patent and Copyright Clause to the Constitution, and defended that clause in Federalist 43, stating “[t]he utility of this power will scarcely be quest...

I was recently alerted[1.  My thanks to Karen Barzilay, who located this text as part of ongoing efforts by the Adams Papers Editorial Project at the Massachusetts Historical Society to put a searcha...

Tomorrow, February 8, the full Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“Federal Circuit”), who receives nearly all patent appeals, will hear oral arguments in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp.  This cas...

In an interesting historical tidbit, last week the Guardian in the United Kingdom published an interview of Martin Goetz.  Goetz is the person awarded the first software patent back in 1968.  In a p...

The U.S. patent system is almost as old as our country. The power to create patents was included in the constitution, and the first Patent Act was enacted in 1790. A lot of opponents of patent reform ...

It may be thermonuclear war, but at least it’s out in the open. We have Steve Jobs to thank, not only for his brilliant contributions to technology, but for launching Apple’s thermonuclear war aga...